Busman’s Holidays

First, dear readers, thank you for your kind words of encouragement. You may not realise quite how important they are to a writer who works in fairly isolated circumstances. There are twin occupational hazards: that you’ll become deluded about the true scale of your own talent, an embittered mutterer against the world of publishing, or…

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Ode to a White Bloke

  So we have a new Poet Laureate. For my non-Brit readers, this is a position conferred by our monarch (as advised by the Prime Minister) and worth, in addition to the honour, £5750 a year plus a butt of sack.  The laurels now sit on the brow of Simon Armitage, who used to work…

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Black Dog

No, I haven’t been on holiday all the time since my last post. Simply that I still don’t have a publisher and it’s now getting embarrassing when people ask. Also, beyond depressing. Thirty years, never out of print, and now this. I mean…. So although I haven’t yet given the order to lower the lifeboats,…

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